Don’t you crave hearing something sane and reasonable on the world scene, in the face of all the saber-rattling and all the war-making? We need a voice that resonates with what is not only best in us but what truly brings us together, what brings us forward, what invites us to live into the possibility that we know is there for us as human beings and for the world. We need to be that voice in our own lives every day, and that voice on the world stage for any who will tune in and listen.

There’s such an attempt to make things come together in people’s lives, among nations, and across the globe. The UN was such an attempt, and there are many others. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem to come together for us as humanity, at least not yet. What is the unifying factor? We talk about the oneness of humanity. How does oneness become operationalized? How does it become real?

Perhaps the most memorable words from Jesus’ Prayer of Intercession from the 17^th chapter of the Book of John in the New Testament are these: “That they all may be one.” Isn’t that our prayer too? Not that we should all be the same but that we know our oneness together in our uniqueness.

There is something else in this prayer that is altogether astounding and almost totally ignored.

And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self.

There are many things Jesus could have said. Perhaps, “Glorify me with thy love, with thy Holy Spirit, with thy truth.” He didn’t say any of those things.

Glorify thou me with thine own self.

What an amazing thing to invite into one’s experience—in this case, from the invisible source of all Being, and the source of his being. Glorify me with thy self. Selfhood glorifies.

Glorify me, not just by reaching out and touching with love, or with the Holy Spirit or with the life that we receive from the Great Mystery. No, with thine own self, the reality of the selfhood of the universe. Can we say that to the invisible source of our own Being, referred to here as the Father but known by whatever name you want to use: O Beloved, glorify me with thine own self? And with the selfhood of all Being comes so much else.

I was meditating upon these words while walking up on the hills in back of the Ranch today. Glorify me with thine own self. And then I looked around—there were deer going through the field, there were flowers bursting all over, there were the smells of spring. With the selfhood of the universe comes everything that we know as Creation. There was the Creator, glorifying my human experience.

Glorify thou me with thine own self.

Could we say that to each other? It’s not only Glorify me with thy mind, or even thine own heart or thine own body, or even thine own spirit. Glorify me with thine own self.

When we touch at the level of self, something magical happens. Everything else comes along. You can’t touch the selfhood of somebody and not touch their heart and their thinking, and their physical presence is there too. So everything else comes along. But the ultimate gold is the gift of selfhood.

In communion with the Invisible, we touch the very heart and soul of the Creator and know it in communion. And then we have the opportunity to touch the Creator in another person. With the Creator that they are, they are bringing along all of the fabulous dimensions of their humanity that manifest from selfhood.

Jesus’ prayer goes on to say something else:

Glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

Before the world was—in other words, the whole world came after self. We try to figure out the world: How are we going to have peace in Syria or North Korea or anyplace else? How are we going to make this world work? Perhaps we think that if we make the world work, we can be present as a self and be happy. Could it be we have it totally backward? The world was created out of self. The world you are living in right now was created out of your selfhood. And yet we, as human beings, are trying to make that world work and forget ourselves, and then maybe we’ll have an experience of being a happy self at the end. No, the experience of happy selfhood is now. It is the beginning of Creation, not the end.

Within the self is the power of Creation. Within the universal self, within the God self, but within yourself, myself, is the Creator, and in the Creator-Self that we are is the power of Creation. We created a life!

I long for somebody on the world scene to be saying something like this:

We know it’s tough and we know we become disappointed in somebody else when they do something horrible. And perhaps we have to do something in the short term to create some protection as best we can. We have to take measures, perhaps, or at least we think we do, that in some way will preserve life and allow us to enter tomorrow without shattering ourselves to smithereens. But really, we don’t believe, in our heart of hearts, that we’re living in a world of terrible people, any of them.

Our enemy isn’t each other—our enemy is ignorance. What is the ignorance? The ignorance is trying to make it come together without self involved. It is trying to make the world work while ignoring your own soul and the selfhood of others. As if the world is going to come together philosophically. That works, right? I have my philosophy and my belief, and if you only believed what I believe, this would all work. Of course, you’re thinking the same thing about me. So that’s not going to bring us together.

The emotional body, by itself, is not going to bring us together, because we feel all kinds of things, depending on the time of day and what day it is and what just happened. And yes, the feelings are involved in bringing us together, but if we try to make our coming together revolve around good feeling, it just doesn’t work.

Sometimes the attempt is made to bring people together at the level of physical form. If only everyone would behave this way that I have decided is right, all would be well. That approach easily goes to dictatorship, at the national level or the family level, and all the levels in between.

Everything comes together when we come together, when we allow our world to be focused in selfhood—who we are. There is a magic to selfhood. It is, at the same time, unique and one. Each one of us is so incredibly different, bringing unique essences and unique gifts. And yet there is something about the selfhood that is replicated in each and every one of us that is the same, that is part of one thing—one reality of selfhood. That is the magic of the universal self. It replicates and expresses itself in all these unique ways. And yet it all is focused in self.

I think of the beautiful image of a prism and the white light that comes into it. Perhaps you have created rainbows on the wall with a prism. That is how it is for self. It comes to focus in someone, and it replicates. Everywhere it replicates it is a whole self.

What’s the significance in our lives as human beings? Put very simply, the world comes together when we come together at the level of self, when we meet each other face-to-face, as ourselves, in a place that’s beyond belief, beyond philosophy, and beyond personality. Then we bring along all our thinking and all our feeling and everything else. At the level of pure selfhood, there is a pristine union that’s available to be known.

Glorify thou me with thine own self.

As we enter into that communion, we create together in a way that is born out of self. All of the rest of our life, all that we create can be coordinated by the self that we are and by the selfhood we share together.

Have you ever noticed that as soon as the pattern of connection between you and another person breaks down, everything breaks down? The thinking breaks down and the world becomes confusing; you can’t figure anything out together when the communion, self-to-self, is interrupted. Emotions of fear and anger separate you.

At a place higher than the everyday consciousness of humanity, we are already in oneness as Being. The highest parts of me don’t have any problem with the highest parts of you. Can we live from that higher place and live into all the manifest expression of ourselves? When that happens, our thinking and our emotions become more and more an expression of that higher reality, which is where the joyous constellation of Being originates.

I had this simple thought this morning as I walked on Green Ridge behind Sunrise Ranch, where I live. You can have as much of it as you want—whatever “it” is for you. Do you want more experience of the joyous constellation of Being? You can have as much as you want. Do you want to fight and argue with others, and try to grab what you want for yourself? You can have as much as you want.

There are caveats to this maxim. Firstly: Be careful what you ask for—you might get it. But you can have as much of it as you want. Secondly: You may not be asking for what you think you’re asking for. Because it’s not just about the words of the lips. There is a deeper asking that is of the heart.

You can have as much of it as you want. So what do you want, and how much do you want? You can have as much suffering as you want. We each can. We can have some and then eat that up and want more. We can have as much as we want. We can have creativity and ecstasy and joy and happiness. How much do you want? How much are you up for?

Here is an expression of a profound desire:

Glorify thou me with thine own self.

What if we walked around all day asking for that? Glorify me by being with me, joining me, and expressing through me.

What if we went around asking that of each other? Of course, we may have history with the people around us. That history can get in the way, whether it is between people or between nations.

What we need is a fresh start. How about the idea that you could glorify me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was? Before the history! That may seem like a chronological statement. I see it also as a statement of the reality we share in the joyous communion of selfhood that transcends the world in which we live. So forget the world for a minute—could we be in a fresh-start moment? Glorify me with thine own self. Drop the history—we’ll create history. We’ll start with self, and then the history can be born out of that. What a glorious way to live!

Does it ever impress you that reality itself is far more glorious than anything you or I could have dreamed up? Like the idea that all of Creation is born out of self. That’s an amazing way to build a world. Or to build a life. It’s all going to come out of the creativity of self. All science is going to be born out of the expression of self, all love, all connection, all creativity, all life—it’s all going to be born as an expression of self. That is a great way to make a reality. That is the reality in which we’re living, which is so much better than you or I might have invented if we created reality.

I celebrate all those, down through history and today, who are an expression of this truth, courageously and undeniably; those who are undeniably themselves. Whether they are harassed for it, abused for it, undeniably they are themselves. On this day I celebrate a man we know as Jesus, who brought such profound love, which is the expression of self. He embodied such amazing, profound love that with all that he said and all that he did it is easy to feel him behind it, and then the profound power of love that he was bringing into the world. How inspiring for you, for me—we are that! And that is actually who we are and what we have to bring into the world when we are being ourselves. As we do, we know our unique self in the joyous constellation of Being.